Poetry. As lush as Rossetti, as energetic as O'Hara, as intense as Mayakofsky, Brandon Downing writes with masterful abandon. "The blood is my age / Met me afterwards / Illegal sound lines // Making it something / So many illegal / The corridor clones / You convex fences // Illegal and lights / Doing bravery lights / Windmills and me / Illegal heights" (from "Introduction V"). The poems in this collection have been widely published in such journals as LUNGFULL!, FENCE, THE GERM, CONDUIT, and NEW AMERICAN WRITING. Brandon Downing is the founding editor of the magazine 6,500, and his books include Lazio and Gog & Horsey Pictures.

Fifty poems to dance (awkwardly) between queer and anxious spaces. Social anxiety runs through I Hate Parties like a current. Recorded on deliberately shaky media, this collection offers the B-side of growing up queer, autistic and nonbinary. From Scruff dates to mix tapes, Jes Battis cruises (and crashes) through wild feelings and minor catastrophes. Dipping readers into a world of missed connections, social disasters and life as a queer party that constantly surprises, Battis uses a light touch and neurodiverse prosody as they chronicle middle-grade queerness and a kind of meandering surreality. From difficult desires, panic attacks and environmental sensitivities, Battis weaves nineties metaphors with current discussions of neurodiversity and trans rights in Canada as they ruminate between past and present like a cat refusing to settle. I Hate Parties guides us through all the best and worst parties of our lives—to the secret room beyond, where being awkward is the one and only dress code.

Elegiac and haunting, Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi completes the KOR-US trilogy, along with Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016) and the National Book Award–winning DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020). Much like Proust's madeleine, a spinning Mercedez Benz ring outside Choi's Berlin window prompts a memory of her father on the Glienicker Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which in turn becomes catalyst for delving into the violent colonial and neocolonial contemporary history of South Korea, with particular attention to the horrors of the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980. Here, photographs, news footage, and cultural artifacts comingle with a poetry of grief that is both personal and collective. Inspired by W. G. Sebald and Walter Benjamin as well as Choi’s DAAD Artists residency in Berlin, Mirror Nation is a sorrowful reflection on the ways in which a place can hold a “magnetic field of memory,” proving that history doesn’t merely repeat itself; history is ever present, chiming the hours in a chorus against empire.